Tag Archives: Escape from Planet Earth

Welcome back to our collective journey through the arse of film in 2014. If you’re still here, then that means that you either recovered from my inclusion of Boyhood on yesterday’s part of the list, or you didn’t read yesterday’s part of the list, didn’t know about that fact and therefore are still on speaking terms with me. If you did miss it, or just want a refresher, you can go here to get all caught up. Otherwise, we’re going to get going with the lowest of the low. So, with no more delay, AVATAR STATE, YIP YIP!

This is a message to the feature-length animation medium as a whole. I AM ON TO YOU. Regular readers of this fine website will already be very well aware that I am a very, very big fan of animation and take criticism of every animated effort that comes my way with the same amount of seriousness and weight as most real critics do “real films” (if you don’t think that many critics find animation some kind of a lesser medium, you are deluding yourself). It doesn’t matter if you are a Disney effort, or a low-budget produced by a studio demanding to make a name for yourself: you step into a cinema, you better believe that I am going to hold you all to the exact same standards of quality and creativity. And if you think that you can sneak past an animated venture with no skill, passion, effort or heart put into it without my calling you out on it? Oh, son, you are in for a very rude awakening, let me tell you.

2014 was the first year since 2005 in which Pixar did not release a film, and many studios took this as an opportunity to get complacent. To think that sufficiently filling the space where Pixar would normally sit would be enough to sucker a whole bunch of monies from parent’s wallets and earn an “eh, what else are you gonna see?” from more uncaring film critics. Those studios would be wrong. Almost every film listed up there is being called out for having open contempt for its audience, thinking of them only as walking wallets rather than moviegoers deserving of entertainment and wonder. Some of those are just plain awful, some are passable, one of which was even rather entertaining as I watched it in the cinema and filed my review, but all but three exist for the sole purpose of trying to ape their much better competitors in search of their residual cash.

Each film listed up there has a laundry list of the tropes and cliches of crappy low-effort animation. These films either have awful, terrifying or personality-free art styles; dull, cheap or just plain poor animation with corners cut at every opportunity; scripts that are devoid of wit, characters, themes and any semblance of originality or unique voice; awfully directed, miscast or just plain bad voice actors – typically celebrities busy cashing their paycheques whilst recording is still ongoing – a complete lack of heart, an overdose on pop-culture references, a cynical desire to just poorly ape the better competition and call it a day, or any combination of the above (and, in one case, all of the above). And in no instances will I stand for it.

Especially since the other companies who did show up to play in 2014 each tried their damndest to raise the bar that these films worked so hard to lower. The Lego Movie gave us a fresh, original, heartfelt and hugely entertaining look at creativity with amazing animation in what could have instead functioned as a 100 minute commercial for Lego. DreamWorks Animation shot for the heart with How To Train Your Dragon 2 – I personally didn’t think it worked, but I’m done repeating myself with that series – shot for straight fun with Penguins Of Madagascar, and attempted to marry the two with Mr. Peabody & Sherman, scoring creative home-runs each time. My Little Pony: Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks took a look at the criticisms of the very good first movie, went away, and proceeded to actively better itself and fix every single one of them near-totally. The Boxtrolls had a messy screenplay that nearly derailed the entire ride but had charm and heart and energy to carry itself through regardless, whilst The Book Of Life allowed an underrated auteur the money and scope to run wild, creating one of the most visually astounding animated films I have ever seen, and one with enough heart and love to downplay its various issues.

Point is, these films try. They really try. They’re not just trying suck money from wallets, they’re trying to be great and do their own unique things. Christ, even the Tinkerbell series is aiming for the heart and has enough sweet sincerity and joy to carry it through its lightweight and occasionally more low-quality moments (turns out that, Pirate Fairy aside, I am a fan of that series). Animation means a tonne to me, the whole process, the whole medium – you should have seen how legitimately bummed out I was upon hearing the news of Christine Cavanaugh’s passing – and I refuse to let blatant, low-quality contemptuous cash-grabs like the films listed above drag the pure wonder and imagination and possibility of this medium down by their mere existence. No fucking way. I am not going to let them prove the snottier members of the film industry right.

So allow me to send out this message to the feature-length animation industry at large: you are all on notice. As long as I am walking this Earth – whether that be in this body or in a cyborg version of my body that my consciousness downloads into, like those in Ghost In The Shell – you will all be going through me. I will be merciless, you will never hear the phrase “good enough for the kids” part from my lips because I know for a fact that, as a kid, I would have demanded better always, and I will most of all be honest. I expect a lot because this medium can do so much, and I will not let low-quality or mediocre wastes of space pass by unscathed. If you can’t match, or don’t want to match, the quality of animation on television right now that I and kids around the world can watch for free – like Gravity Falls, Regular Show, Wander Over Yonder, or The Legend Of Korra – then scrap everything and start again because why the fuck should I and we devote time and money to you if you’re not aiming for the level of free entertainment? You have all been warned.

Oh, and for the record? Worst animated film of the year is The Nut Job, maybe even of the decade. It’s not even a contest.

Oh, Jason Reitman. What the f*ck happened to you, man? You made Juno, Up In The Air, Young Adult, and Thank You Smoking! And then, in the space of 12 months, you make Labor Day and Men, Women & Children? Is this some kind of James Franco-esque performance art piece? Did you voluntarily take a torch to your once-promising career just to see how devoted fans like myself would react? Did you trip over something in the dark, bang your head and just forget how to make good movies? Was your family held hostage by madmen who refused to let them go until you shat out two utterly irredeemable stinkers to sully your track record possibly irreparably? What is it? I need answers, man!

Men, Women & Children is the kind of film that I would have spent almost the entire runtime inadvertently and derisively laughing at and mocking had it come from anybody else and were it any less self-serious about itself. Men, Women & Children is a walking self-parody that is way too goddamn serious about its overly delusional fears of the Internet and technology to find the slightest bit funny. A tone-deaf, one-sided, hysterical (in the sense that it’s gone mad from trying to make its point) two hour screed against the Internet and modern technology that only serves to make its co-writer and director seem like the kind of crotchety old man who yells at those darn kids to get off of his lawn and who lives for Bingo night.

It saddles its very talented cast with material better fit for a failing first year drama group, creates a hateful straw-woman to invite viewers to throw righteous scorn at only to turn around and spend 95% of its runtime agreeing with her, and maniacally believes that all of the world’s relationship and intimacy problems would be solved if the Internet and modern technology didn’t exist. It has an incredibly conservative and dim view on any kind of sex and sexual arousal that doesn’t have to do with the ‘traditional’ way of doing things. It constantly tries to make its point that all of our personal problems that technology amplifies are ultimately small and meaningless by repeatedly cutting to the Hubble telescope and very subtly hinting that we should drop our reliance on technology and instead get to work on technology, in a blissfully ignorant piece of hypocrisy. It is a film with nothing new or interesting or nuanced to say despite its grim, serious, sermonising message-movie tone.

It, may I remind you, is a film in which Dean Norris actually jumps back in shock and mild fear from his computer when he discovers that pressing up on a keyboard causes a videogame avatar to move forward. And let’s not forget the moment in which Adam Sandler tries to straight-facedly finger 9/11 as the moment where we as a society retreated into technology and everything subsequently changed for the worse.

Look, I am not inherently opposed to media that portrays technology as evil or a thing to be feared – I, like any good person, adore Black Mirror – but if you are going to make a serious and frequently anti-tech look at the way that technology and the Internet have affected our modern day relationships, spending two hours hysterically shrieking at the top of your lungs that “THE INTERNET IS EVIL! IT MUST BE PURGED TO SAVE US ALL! I AM THE VERY FIRST PERSON TO EVER COME TO THIS CONCLUSION! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!” is not the way to go about it. The most maddening part of Men, Women & Children is that there is a damn great, nuanced, smart and thought-provoking film to be made using these actors, this director and this set-up, and at no point does the finished product ever hint at that better movie. It sucks, it sucks uncontrollably and insufferably, and I worry that Jason Reitman may be incapable of bouncing back. I really hope I am wrong.

03] Nativity! 3: Dude, Where’s My Donkey?!

Dir: Debbie Isitt

Star: Martin Clunes, Marc Wooton, Catherine Tate

Nativity! 3: Dude, Where’s My Donkey?! is the worst film of 2014. It is the worst film I have ever sat through to the very end. Nativity! 3 is the abyss of cinema made corporeal. The Nativity! series has never been good, but at least the first one attempted to be a film that was watchable and the second was still a film – sort of, in that it at least had a coherent plot even if it bordered on being unwatchable. Nativity! 3, however, is a giant middle finger to the entire concept of film, filmmaking, and the audience who voluntarily chose to part with their time and money by watching it.

There is no plot to Nativity! 3. The other instalments in this abominable series at least attempted to have something resembling a coherent plot. This one has no such attempt. Stuff happens, with no rhyme or reason. Plots and arcs and characters are brought up, discarded, brought back, dumped in the bin, treated with absolutely no care or sensitivity, used to simply mark time and nothing else, or force their way into proceedings at the most inopportune moments. Nothing makes sense and the film doesn’t care that none of this makes sense. I’d say that a 5 year-old could do better than this but, quite frankly, I get the feeling that this is all very deliberate. “Go on,” the film seems to taunt, “Try and make sense of this. Try and explain how we got from Martin Clunes arriving at the world’s worst primary school to whip the kids into shape, to an entire class full of kids serenading Catherine Tate at a wedding in New York that’s not to the fiancée she started out the film with, without frying and killing several of your most important brain cells.”

And I assume that it’s deliberate because, quite frankly, everything about Nativity! 3 seems carefully controlled and co-ordinated to be as deliberately offensively awful as is humanly possible. Why else would every performance be screeched at the top of everyone’s lungs with no subtlety or variation? Why else would the film purport to be a musical yet drop its musical conceit for half of its runtime and, despite having already done this twice before, have every single one of its songs be shot and choreographed with no flair and a faint collective embarrassment about it all? Why else would the film revel in its sub-CBBC production values and shooting style? Why else would Mr. Poppy, the single worst, most annoying and most evil character in film today, continue to hang around and be treated like some kind of saint and somebody we should all look up to?

And this sh*t is being peddled for kids! Everybody involved believes that the abomination that they have crafted is perfect for kids! Maybe it is, if you hate your kids and think that they are no more intelligent than the bacteria that thrives in your toilet bowl. No kid deserves to be forced to sit through this tripe, no matter how bad they’ve been. This is a film that thinks kids are total imbeciles who should reject any and all authority, follow around a clearly mentally-ill man who they don’t have permission to run off with and who is not even employed by the school he keeps hanging around at, do the bidding of said man with no hesitation or complaint, blame the victim for anything bad that happens to them frequently and mercilessly – seriously, the film keeps loudly shouting that it was recent amnesiac Martin Clunes’ own fault for losing his memory and that the reason that he doesn’t get his memories back is because he doesn’t want to, and is proven to be right – and angrily and threateningly rap at said victim for any perceived mistake.

Nativity! 3: Dude, Where’s My Donkey?! – and, incidentally, I am immensely saddened by the fact that it is 2014 and we are still making “Dude, where’s my car?” jokes – is anti-cinema. It is a film that hates everyone and everything, spending every last second of its inexplicable 110 minute runtime actively daring the viewer to keep watching, and has such a blatant disregard for the basic tenants of good filmmaking that I can only take it as a deliberate and intentional desire to make the worst film ever released in human existence. If it was, then congratulations, I am 99% certain that everyone involved has succeeded in their lofty goal.

The film’s writer-director Debbie Isitt, who once upon a time brought us the genuinely decent Confetti, hit back against critics who derided her film claiming that we critics are “just so out of touch with what people like or want.” If this is what the people like and want, then God help us all.

So, after 7,000 words, 11 pages, 16 films and pretty much every single negative adjective in the English language, we have arrived at my Bottom Film of 2014. We have gone through films that disappointed me, films that encapsulated everything wrong with current cinema, films that fail at the basic tenants of filmmaking, and films that just plain pissed me off. But none of those have taken my absolute bottom slot on my 2014 list. Instead, and from the moment I saw it I knew it was destined for this slot, it went to The Riot Club. So, why? Why The Riot Club over “the abyss of cinema” and a sh*tty rom-com that wouldn’t stop infecting my brain for at least a month after I saw it.

Simple. Because, unlike those two films, I was literally five seconds away from walking out of The Riot Club.

Allow me to explain. The Riot Club is a British thriller centred around the exploits of the titular club – a very unsubtle expy of the famous Bullingdon Club – home of the richest, poshest and most spoilt male members of Oxford University. These are the men who will go on to basically run the country and the club is their place to abuse their privilege, blow off steam, and generally just behave as vile, loathsome degenerates. They mentally and physically abuse each other, recklessly destroy public and private property, sexually harass any and all women they see, and spout things like “I am sick to death of POOR PEOPLE!” It is not unclear as to what exactly this film’s message is. And whilst that would lead to the question as to why one would sit through 107 minutes of this stuff, it’s not inherently a problem since the film sounds clear and consistent in its message.

Except that it is not. Not at all. The Riot Club spends 107 minutes being openly, loudly and insufferably hypocritical. See, The Riot Club wants you to hate these disgusting cretins, and spends much of its runtime screaming at you about how terrible these upper-class twits are. However, The Riot Club also spends its time indulging them, egging them on, wanting them to be bad, evil, violent, sexist, rape-y so that it has more material to film. For every scene where it invites the audience to fling fruit at its cast, there’s another where it turns around screams “More! MORE! MORE!!” at the cast it supposedly hates, revelling in the debauchery it otherwise spends its runtime constantly denouncing as evil and awful.

In other words, it’s a worst case scenario equivalent of The Wolf Of Wall Street. That film never openly denounces its despicable cast of characters because it knows that the audience will get how awful these characters are through their actions. It doesn’t indulge them, it doesn’t openly judge, and it always keeps its moral compass and central message clear and lifted above the muck of everything else. By contrast, The Riot Club is a humourless nagging nanny that thinks the audience won’t understand that the posh upper classes think of the lower classes as pond scum unless it has multiple walking cartoon characters state as much out loud every 5 minutes. It indulges them frequently, sets them up to make themselves look awful, and lowers itself to their level as if it is having just as much fun preying on and exploiting their antics as they do preying on the lower-classes.

And when the film gets to its centrepiece – a near 50 minute sequence set at a club dinner that screams “this is where we’re just going to do the play the film is based on now, if that’s OK” – it becomes a test of just how much longer one can take the hypocrisy. Does one stop during the endless drinking games? How about when they continually insult the perfectly nice lower-class hosts? When they bring in a female sex worker and try everything to keep her from leaving? How about when Milo’s middle-class girlfriend turns up and we seem about 3 seconds away from a rape scene? All the while, the film practically jerks off to itself on screen. “Yes! Yes! More! Threaten Natalie Dormer a little more! Smash up that back room like a group of apes flinging their poo around! Yes! Phwoah!”

My final straw came when the lower-class pub owner, who has had enough of their degenerate antics in his establishment, comes to throw them out and everybody takes turns beating him to a state of near-death. This scene, much like everything in this goddamn f*cking movie, goes on for an uncomfortably long time, as the film takes its sweet time deriving its own sick pleasure from the action being depicted. Much like everything else in the film, what starts as The Riot Club shouting “Shame on you! You people are despicable!” morphs into it yelling “Yeah! YEAH! KICK HIS FUCKING HEAD IN! THE TWAT DESERVES IT!”

And at that point, I reached over, grabbed my bag and jacket, stood up and started walking towards the exit. I was done. I was tapping out. I was about to walk out of a film, which I had never done before in my entire life. The sole film I had ever stopped on its first showing because I refused to witness one more second of it was Disaster Movie and its dubious club was about to get a new member, only this time I was actually going to walk out of a cinema.

But then I checked my watch, to see how far in I’d made it to what was about to become the second film to ever beat me. To my surprise, I discovered that I only had 20 minutes left to sit through. Of the 107 minutes that the film was scheduled to run for, I had survived 87. The finish line was in sight and I was about to give up. So, reasoning that I’d managed to make it this far and that there wasn’t enough time left for the film to somehow sink even lower, I turned around, went back to my seat, put my jacket and bag back in place, and sat back down. Sure enough, the film didn’t manage to plumb even further depths in those remaining 20 minutes and I managed to avoid my first walk-out by mere seconds.

That is why The Riot Club is #1 on My Bottom 10 Films of 2014. It is an evil little film and it was literally 5 seconds away from beating me. If that doesn’t deserve the top placement, I don’t know what does.

And so wraps up My Bottom 10 Films of 2014 list, as well as my review of 2014! It, despite this list, has been a great year for films (although not so much for everything else) and I am so grateful for the ability to use space on this website to talk about it all over the past year. Thank you to every single one of you for reading my work, leaving your feedback and generally just not chasing me away with pitchforks and torches! Here’s to 2015!

Very funny, ludicrous amounts of fun, and with a surprising injection of just the right amount of heart, Penguins Of Madagascar does right by its title characters.

by Callum Petch (Twitter: @CallumPetch)

I’m telling you right now, I don’t ever want to hit an age or level of jadedness as a film critic where I don’t find films like Penguins Of Madagascar to be absolutely wonderful. If you’ve been following along with this website over the past year, you will have witnessed my journey through the year’s animated releases and seen me find many of them… lacking, let’s put it that way. I realise that I can come off as unnecessarily harsh, but – as mentioned in my review of The Nut Job – I judge harshly because I care. I care deeply and I want animated films to try, to try and be more than a sinkhole for parents’ money. They can reach farther, try harder, tell grand stories about the human condition…

…or they can be Penguins Of Madagascar. Look, Penguins Of Madagascar does not reinvent any wheels, it does not push any boundaries, it does not attempt to dazzle the eyes with outstanding visuals, it does not try and make any bold statements or messages you won’t have heard from a million animated films beforehand. It knows this and it’s consciously not trying to do those things. What separates Penguins Of Madagascar from your Nut Jobs and your Planes and your House Of Magics is fun. Real fun. Penguins’ mission, above all else, is to be tonnes of palpable fun. This is lightweight stuff, but it’s not soulless stuff. There is effort and attention and love here; a desire to create real fun.

Or, to put it another way, it’s the difference between Crank 2: High Voltage and a crappy Steven Seagal vehicle, between The Avengers and Transformers, between The Hunger Games and Divergent. One is farted out with the sole intention of box office dollars, the other knows exactly what it wants to be and goes about fulfilling that ambition and intention with style, energy, affection and sheer stick-to-it-iveness.

Based on the spin-off TV series of almost the same name but set in the timeline of the films – if this sounds confusing, fret not as the film’s attitude towards this mishmash is encapsulated perfectly by the kid-focussed prologue being dated as “Some Years Ago” – Penguins follows the scene-stealing Penguins from the Madagascar series. There’s Skipper (Tom McGrath) – the leader who is committed to his team and doesn’t like his authority being questioned – Kowalski (Chris Miller) – the brains of the outfit and a propensity for bluntness – Rico (Conrad Vernon) – the near-silent and crazed demolitions expert – and Private (Christopher Knights) – a lone egg the rest of the team rescued and welcomed into the group as one of their own, and who wishes to be seen as a valued member of the team.

On the eve of the final performance from Madagascar 3, the Penguins choose to celebrate Private’s 10th birthday by breaking into Fort Knox and treating him to a packet of Cheese Dibbles. The event turns out to be a trap, however, and the team are captured by the evil octopus Dave (John Malkovich) – who also moonlights as a human scientist named Dr. Octavious Brine, it’s nicely ridiculous and genuinely rather a bit creepy – who, fuelled by years of resentment of being overshadowed by cute and cuddly penguins that started when our lead quartet were first installed at Central Park Zoo, has built a penguin-focussed super-weapon with evil intentions. The Penguins resolve to take Dave down, but end up having proceedings complicated by the arrival of interspecies task force The North Wind – led by the egotistical glory-hogging Classified (Benedict Cumberbatch).

The plot is really not any more complicated than that and all of the expected beats are hit at the appropriate times. Certain scenes are more than a little forced, especially the attempts at book-ending the film, but it still all works because these beats are used as jumping off points for jokes, fun and heart. The obvious scenes – the tension between the two teams, The All Is Lost Moment, the point where Private steps up – are executed with genuine sincerity, the feeling that these scenes have been used because they are what best helps and best fits the story rather than obligation or “this is what we need to do in order to print money”.

That is not to say that Penguins Of Madagascar is overly serious. In fact, quite the opposite. This is silly, light-hearted, fast-paced nonsense. But the film is serious in its desire to entertain. Hence why it goes all out in the action sequences. A gondola chase in Venice takes a sudden detour on land, the opening rescue of Private’s egg moves with speed and high energy, whilst the final setpiece shrinks the scale and minimises the carnage but still feels noticeably climactic and high-stakes. The standout, though, is an alternately hysterical and technically jaw-dropping one-take sequence in which the Penguins make a sudden exit from a cargo plane taking them to an assigned safe-house and attempt to find a different ride or a safe landing. It’s crazed and fast and incredibly fun, which sums up the film’s overall feel, to be honest. Pure, undiluted fun.

Incidentally, whilst I’m on the subject, that one-take free-fall sequence is the only time the animation truly stuck out to me. The Madagascar art-style is very much set in stone by this point and there’s been no real majorly noticeable technical upgrade between films to make proceedings stand out. Storyboarding and layout is decidedly unspectacular, so the film ends up sliding comfortably into the Madagascar canon without really amazing the eyeballs. This is fine – as again, the film isn’t trying to astound the eyeballs, and visuals that are too good-looking would likely distract from the intended mood – but it does make the one-take sequence stand out even more, as the film doesn’t really try to match that kind of scale or ambition again. It is insanely cool, mind, so try not to read that as an insult.

Anyways, as mentioned, Penguins is major amounts of fun. The whole film carries with it this light, energetic kind-hearted feel. The film is never mean-spirited, never overly-dark, never sacrifices its heart or nicer kinder characters for a quick laugh. There’s clear love and affection going on here, a real desire to cut loose and have fun with the premise as much as possible. And that fun is incredibly infectious. From about minute number 2 – when the title cards disappear – to roughly minute 86 – after the mid-credits stinger has finished – I had this big goofy grin plastered on my face and it only wavered for the few moments where the film gets some semblance of serious.

That’s as good a segway as I can think of. So, the heart. Penguins has one. It has a big one tattooed on its chest, powering proceedings. The dynamic between the Penguins is what keeps the film going, keeps that spirit up. The group are always true companions with one another and this fact is constantly underlined and reinforced. The main conflict of the film – which is not Dave, although he is the catalyst for it, but is instead Private’s desire to be seen as more than The Cute One in the eyes of Skipper – comes from a place of genuine underestimation and obliviousness, rather than meanness, which is precisely why it works. It’s in character, at all times, and that enables the film’s final third – where said heart bursts through front and centre without overcooking or schmaltz-ifying the film – to connect way harder than it seems like it would.

Of course, though, Penguins Of Madagascar is supposed to be a comedy and what good is a comedy without good jokes? Well, good news on that front, there are good jokes here. Lots of good jokes. In fact, I’m not going to undersell it, Penguins is loaded front-to-back with damn good jokes and they come at a ferocious pace with an excellent hit/miss ratio. Of particular note is the film’s lack of reliance on pop culture references – the frequent DreamWorks fall-back during their darker days. Here, they are limited to one running gag where Dave names his subordinates in such a way that shouting combinations of names in quick succession equals names of actors. Now, this is the same gag that Escape From Planet Earth did earlier in the year (much to my derision), but the film stretches this to its absolute limits until the joke becomes a joke itself – “Kevin! Bake on! We’re going to need that victory cake!” I mean, they’re still major groaners, but at least there’s meaning behind them besides, “Reference! Laugh!”

Other than that, the jokes are of the ridiculous silliness variety, albeit silliness rooted in character work. There’s no random silliness for random silliness’ sake. The “River dance!” gag is based on the Penguins believing Shanghai to be Dublin, for example, whilst Dave’s attempt at a video call works both on the base level – the increasing frustration of the team, the mundanity of the situation – and a character level – the guy may be competent with evil plans but he is utterly useless at pretty much everything else – and there are a pair of gags in the film’s final third involving The North Wind and a giant explosion that work extra-well because of Classified’s prior characterisation. There is also a bunch of toilet humour, mostly in the form of pure groaners, but the film’s rapid-fire pace ensures that a gag that doesn’t work will be followed up by five or so that do soon after.

Also, the film openly calls out how irritating “I Like To Move It” and “Afro Circus” are during our first present-day scene, and I am perfectly fine with pandering when its aimed at me and completely deserved.

Since Penguins Of Madagascar is primarily a comedy, I’m resisting awarding it top five-star honours for now – because pure comedies, ones like this, I also judge on how a second viewing treats them – but I can still comfortably place this film in the highest echelons of the year’s animated films. If The Lego Movie is at the top of the pile, and The Nut Job resides in Sub-Basement 5, then Penguins is currently sharing the number 2 slot with My Little Pony: Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks and that number 2 slot is just a whisker away from The Lego Movie. This is an incredibly funny, incredibly fun, surprisingly heartfelt animated film, and living proof that not aiming for the stars does not automatically mean “cheap creatively-bankrupt piece of crap” and does not mean that trying is optional.

2014 has been a really miserable and disappointing year for animated features. Penguins Of Madagascar proves that we can have it better and that we don’t need to re-invent the wheel in the process.

I have been given crap for my review of Tinker Bell & The Pirate Fairybecause I dared to compare it to other, far superior animated movies on the market; your Lego Movies, your Mr. Peabody & Shermans, your Frozens, even your How To Train Your Dragons. I got stick for commenting in detail on the animation quality. I got stick for attempting to evaluate the film despite not being part of the target audience. (I also got stick for not having familiarised myself with the series beforehand which is a fair complaint that I will admit is unprofessional of me.) I have even been accused of being the kind of guy who nitpicks at supposedly perfectly good films for no other reason than I like to and that I am the kind of guy who has forgotten why I go to the cinema: to have fun.

I don’t feel shamed by any of this. Really, I don’t. I don’t feel any remorse whatsoever for that review and I don’t feel any remorse for my continuing love and harsh criticism of animated films. Do you want to know why? It is not because I am a fun-hating killjoy with a giant stick shoved right up where the sun don’t shine. No, it is because I love animation. I adore animation. I always have and, goddammit, I always will. The medium is one filled with boundless, near-limitless storytelling potential. A chance to create and display images of astounding beauty that would be impossible or near-impossible to replicate in live-action. The possibility to take the viewer on a trip to brand-new worlds, the likes of which one has never seen before. A chance to make the kind of films and tell the kind of stories that would never get funded in live-action, wouldn’t have the same experience as in live-action, and to create a timelessness that telling the story in live-action might lack. Pixar (circa 1995 – 2010, minus 2006) were kings at crafting lived-in worlds, Disney can pump out strong, memorable characters in their sleep, DreamWorks at their best know perfectly how to balance comedy and strong character work, Persepolis (although not a kids’ film) is one of the most beautiful and emotionally affecting films that I have ever seen and could only be told in the way that it was via animation.

So, no. I will not apologise for the way I review animated films. I will not be forced to apologise for holding animated features a higher standard. Because I know that this medium can do better. I know for a fact that it is better and deserves better than the crap that is constantly pumped out cynically for a quick buck. I know that shovelware is going to crop up for all mediums and that live-action cinema, in all of its forms, has just as much, if not more, crap than the animated landscape ever will have. And guess what? I’ll call those out for being terrible, too. But animation means a whole lot to me and to be accused of being a fun-killer for not giving a pass to every cheap mediocre-or-worse slop that is plopped down in cinemas for the sole purpose of sucking parents’ wallets clean because, “Hey, the cinema’s cheaper than a babysitter,” infuriates me. I hate because I love, I hold animation to a higher standard because it can do better and I don’t just give slop aimed at the youngest and stupidest of children a pass because, guess what, they deserve better. And they can get better; turn on the TV to quite literally any cartoon channel nowadays and they will get better for free! There is no excuse and I will never apologise for the way I go about reviewing these films.

I bring this up because The Nut Job is literally a walking example of everything that is wrong with animated kids’ films. This is a film designed by a committee for the sole purpose of making money. There is no heart, there are no characters, there are fart noises and Gangam Style music cues in lieu of jokes, the animation is mediocre at best and terrible at worst, the voice acting is boring and uncommitted, the art design and layout and storyboarding is all lifeless and uninteresting. No effort has been put in, not in conception, not in execution. The one interesting thing it has is the fact that it kind of wants to be a heist movie, but it bungles proceedings so thoroughly, and seems so uninterested in actually being a heist movie, that all it does is leave me wishing that somebody would make an actually good animated heist movie.

Think of something that happens in a bad kids’ movie and it turns up here. A cast of characters who have one single trait, go through pretty much no arcs, and who exist almost solely for jokes yet the film still wants you to care about anyway? Lame puns based on a word that is supposedly inherently funny but really isn’t yet the film stops to call attention to it before moving on? Sequences set to chart-ready pop songs, including one where the film stops dead for a good minute because it was popular when the film went into production? Disconnected story threads where the human villains get nearly as much screen-time as the animals that we’re supposed to care about, and who keep getting shoved back into the main plot despite their overall irrelevance to it? A section near the end where it looks like our hero has died, and the film acts like he has, but then it turns out he’s actually OK and you were crying for no reason (which is a trope/beat I am officially banning all movies of all kinds from using in the future)? A lead female protagonist who is supposedly tough and capable on her own yet whose only function is to be constantly rescued by our lead male protagonist? An “Obligatory Dance Party Ending Over The Credits”? Yes, they are all present and correct and done with so little effort or interest it’s insulting.

The jokes, meanwhile… oh, lord, the jokes. The Nut Job has all kinds of bad jokes. We got fart jokes, jokes based on characters very noticeably and clumsily dropping the word “nut” into a sentence, jokes based around characters dancing to Gangam Style, obvious blind jokes, jokes that just involve characters shouting lines of dialogue at one another, jokes that just involve characters screaming lines of dialogue at one another, jokes designed around the fact that one of the characters has a bird who looks exactly like one of the Angry Birds birds, and jokes based around how irritatingly stupid the whole cast is (a stupid cast is fine in a comedy, obviously, but you need actual jokes because otherwise you’ve just got annoyingly stupid characters). Each joke is pulled off with a total lack of skill, effort, construction and timing (said fart jokes genuinely just involves fart sound effects playing on a near-constant loop on the soundtrack at one point as everyone takes turns to say how disgusting farting is). There is one, precisely one, that got a positive reaction out of me and that involved two speeding vans passing a donut shop, upon which point every cop inside collectively have their heads rise up like an old broken-down animatronic on a fairground ride. Everything else landed with a thud at best, or a sigh of derision at worst.

Animation is all over the shop. At the best of times, it’s half as good as Monsters Inc. from 2001. Character models lack detail but they are passable enough, scampering is clearly hiding a limited budget but at least fits considering the fact that we’re talking about squirrels and rats and the like, and there’s a bit in the finale involving water that doesn’t look horrible. Otherwise, this is hideous. Lighting is dreadful, sequences set at night barely look any different from sequences set in the day except that the sky is now purple. Everything lacks detail, something that’s especially prominent whenever the famed and desired nuts get a close-up and just end up looking plastic. Character movements that don’t involve scampering are too restrained and unconvincing, especially whenever cartoon physics take over (there are multiple jokes that should end with one or more characters dead which, incidentally, saps any tension the later sequences should have). Facial expressions frequently border on completely lifeless and mostly just settle for plain boredom, the lone female human genuinely looks like a Barbie doll and it is creepy as all hell. And character designs are uninspired with some characters (namely that bird and any and all humans) looking like they don’t even belong in the same film as the rest.

Also, during the aforementioned end credits dance party, an animated version of Psy comes out to dance to Gangam Style and I am not kidding or exaggerating or anything of the sort when I tell you that it is genuinely the cheapest and lowest resolution animation that I have seen in a feature-length animated film released in cinemas in… in… You know, I honestly can’t recall ever seeing an uglier and lower-quality piece of a theatrically-released animated feature-film. It is quite literally unbelievable just how horrible the end credits look.

Also of note is just how despicably unlikable the lead character is. Surly (voiced by a Will Arnett who clearly does not care enough to keep up the Russian accent I think his character is supposed to have) is a thoroughly unpleasant lead who is mean to everybody, selfish, and isn’t even witty or entertaining to make up for that fact. He’s just a jerk, a complete and total jerk. And he remains that way for a good 80% of the film’s runtime despite needing to become a more selfless and heroic guy at the end. So, at the 80% mark, around about the time the film’s big lifeless final chase scene starts, he suddenly becomes a paragon of virtue. As expected, it didn’t take to me, and it especially didn’t take seeing as every other character in the film is a complete tool that nobody in their right mind would step up and defend or a really annoying one-joke blank slate (step right up, the groundhogs) that is impossible to care about.

You want to distract your kids with cartoons for two hours? Turn on Cartoon Network, turn on Nicktoons, turn on Disney; turn on any TV channel that shows cartoons because there are brand new kids’ shows on the air right now who are of far higher quality than this crap and which will cost you pretty much nothing. Just do not take them to this because not only is there better, and not only do your kids deserve better, animation as a whole deserves better. Do not reward them for churning sh*t like this out.

This week’s podcast introduces a young, fresh-faced critic to the mix in Callum Petch. Much like the plot of Wes Anderson’s new film The Grand Budapest Hotel, this episode sees a classy yet older gentleman (James) taking a young and enthusiastic outsider under his tutelage. At least that’s how James sees it.

We also have reviews of 300: Rise of an Empire and Escape from Planet Earth, as well as our plans for how to save the Die Hard franchise, and some bitter accusations of cheating in the quiz.

You could probably make a good movie out of Escape From Planet Earth. This isn’t that movie. Not at all.

by Callum Petch

Fun Fact: this film has been out in America for over a year. No, really. It got its American release on February 13th of 2013. It’s been on Netflix Instant over there for a good while, too. I was told this by an American friend of mine over Twitter whilst I killed time waiting for it to start. Naturally, that info bode well for what I was going to see. Yet, I held out some hope. Rainmaker Entertainment, the people responsible for the film, aren’t exactly first-timers. They made the first ever all-CG cartoon TV series in the form of Re-Boot, they’ve been pumping out Direct-To-DVD Barbie films since 2001, they made that one Dire Straits video that everyone remembers as well as something called Tony Hawk in Boom Boom Sabotage (which, yes, I have seen before… it’s not good), and they’re going to give us big screen versions of Ratchet & Clank and Sly Cooper in the near future! Past experience is past experience and I was hoping for a good film.

Escape From Planet Earth is not a good film. Think of every single bad trait of your stereotypically bad kids’ animated film. Chances are it shows up here at least three times. Sequences set to chart-ready pop songs? Sledgehammer-subtle moralising message? Fart jokes? Toilet humour? Jokes specifically for parents that typically involve gay panic or implied rape as punchlines? Pop culture references in place of actual jokes? Obnoxious product placement? An unfunny catchphrase repeated ad nauseam in an effort to make it the next cultural phenomenon because if you say it enough times then kids will eventually start saying it too? (It’s “Scorch me, baby” in case you’re wondering.) Bored celebrities turning in paycheque collecting performances? Really cheap animation? They’re all here and all accounted for and result in one of the most singularly boring bad movies I have had the displeasure of sitting through in quite some time.

Our story, which proceeds at light speed because this film is barely 90 minutes with credits, revolves around two alien brothers. Scorch (Brendan Fraser) is the younger brother and he’s a heroic manly man who’s kinda dumb and also a jerk but he’s got big muscles and a love for danger and action; Gary (Rob Corddry) is the older brother and he’s more cautious and detail-oriented, a bit of a doormat and the head of Mission Control, ergo he’s supposed to be in command of his brother. They don’t get along. After yet another argument about their opposing viewpoints on life, Gary quits and Scorch has to take on his next mission alone: a recon mission to The Dark Planet, otherwise known as Earth, where he is promptly captured by the military, led by General James T Shanker (William Shatner and, yes, that is the supposedly clever joke). Feeling partly responsible, Gary heads off on a rescue mission, where both he and Scorch may just learn a thing or two about a thing or two, whilst his wife Kira (Sarah Jessica Parker) and son try and uncover the conspiracy back home. Because there’s also a conspiracy, involving the head of the alien planet’s space program (voiced by Jessica Alba). And there’s also two comic relief human characters (voiced by Chris Parnell and Steve Zahn). And Gary is almost immediately captured by the military, too, and thrown into Area 51 where he meets four other aliens. And there’s also some little green…

You get the point. This movie is overstuffed and the fact that it runs the credits at about minute 80 of 89 means that everything is glossed over with the bare minimum of effort and detail. Gary is the only slightly developed character here and that’s purely because he’s the lead. Otherwise, there are no real characters in this movie and that makes it hard to care about what happens to all of them. This goes double for the central brother dynamic between Scorch and Gary because Scorch is kind of an irredeemable asshat. He’s pompous, hot-headed, a dick to Gary, reckless and only seems loving of Gary when it’s time for the finale to kick in because “brothers may sometimes just be total dicks” is not the kind of message we’re supposed to be sending kids home with. If he were at least entertaining to watch then I’d be OK with this, but he isn’t because he’s just not funny and, therefore, what should have been the emotional core of the film rings hollow.

On that note: the animation and the character designs. To be blunt, I have not seen an animated film that looks this ugly since… well, probably since Tony Hawk in Boom Boom Sabotage. The character designs are friggin’ awful. I initially entertained the possibility that the designers were purposefully going for off-putting designs for the aliens, they’d contrast well with the humans and deliver aliens that look like actual aliens for once, but nope. The humans then enter and they’re just as boxy, lifeless and Madame Tussauds-y as the aliens. It’s like somebody tried to surgically blend the styles of early DreamWorks and veryearly Pixar (as in, Tin Toy-era Pixar) and ended up with the ugly monstrosities you see before you.

And then there’s the actual animation itself. $40 million may not seem like a lot to make a CG animated movie with (Disney and Pixar flicks haven’t had budgets below $150 million since 2010, for example) except that I question where most of that money went. This is very limited animation. Cameras are often static, facial expressions number about five, several scenes and sequences seem to have a maximum of four items moving at most at one time, and I don’t think that anyone ever blinks. Like, I don’t think anyone just naturally blinks during conversation. It doesn’t feel like the work of veterans who have been in the industry for upwards of 20 years, it feels like the assessed project of a first year animator. The Lego Movie cost merely $20 million more and look at that compared to this! Tinker Bell and The Pirate Fairy (which I previously reviewed here) likely cost pittance (less than $10 mil) and that looks better than this! Maker, My Little Pony: Equestria Girls was animated in Flash and that looks better than this!

That $40 million, then, more than likely went to the ‘all-star’ voice cast and I really hope that those involved found some way to get the majority of it back from them. Brendan Fraser is the only one who at least attempts to put on a voice. Unfortunately, that voice is Brendan Fraser trying a Patrick Warburton impersonation and it’s pretty damn not-good. But at least he tries throughout, which is more than I can say for Jessica Alba, who gives off the impression that she mumbled the lines in her sleep. Sofia Vergara is near-impossible to understand because she plays up her accent way too much. Ricky Gervais (oh yeah, Ricky Gervais is in this as a sarcastic British computer named James Bing because of course he is) is on auto-pilot. And then there’s Rob Corddry who maintains a sub-“Patton Oswalt in Ratatouille” voice the entire way through but seems to be eternally waiting for his cheque to clear. Then, halfway through, it apparently does and he proceeds to give line readings like he’s ordering a pizza.

(In fact, sidebar before we move on: why do all animated feature films insist on getting expensive celebrities to voice in their films? I assume it’s because marketing love to trumpet the names as a selling point in order to get more reluctant parents into the cinema, because kids will apparently show up to anything shiny and loud enough. Counterpoint: when has this ever worked? When was the last time any parents were persuaded to take their kids to a crappy looking animated flick on the promise of Brendan Fraser? Professional voice actors, ones like Tom Kenny or John DiMaggio or Tara Strong or Troy Baker or Grey DeLisle-Griffin or I could go on all day here folks, do this stuff for a living! Most of the time, you want a good voice acting performance out of an untrained celebrity, you need excellent direction. Professional voice actors could likely get you a sensational performance from that excellent direction. And, if you’re talking business-wise, they’re often cheaper, too, which lets you pump the money you were going to use to hire Sarah Jessica Parker back into the production. So cut it out with the often-dreadful celebrities! Sidebar over!)

So far we’ve established that there’s a lack of heart, a lack of characters, poor pacing, ugly characters, by-the-numbers plot and lifeless animation in Escape From Planet Earth, but the fun doesn’t stop there! Nope, because now we hit the jokes, which are lazy and unfunny. Hey, guess what, everyone! Did you know that humanity are the real monstrous aliens? And that aliens invented the internet and cell phones and social networking because we’re too dumb to do so otherwise? Oh, hold my aching sides because, movie, you just blew my mind with laughter at those genius gags(!) There’s also a bunch of physical comedy that lands with a thud because, again, the animation running this show is god-awful.

What’s worst of all, though, is that there are some genuinely funny gags here. The order to destroy Halley’s Comet is accompanied with an instruction to prepare a condolence card for Halley’s family, in one of those kind of purposefully silly gags that I, and likely only I, find amusing. There’s a short sequence that parodies 50s-style American instructional films and a bit where the gang find the camouflaged spaceship in a trailer park by yelling out “TORNADO ALERT” and seeing which door doesn’t immediately lock itself. These should be funny, and would be funny, but the sheer dull unfunny-ness of the rest of the film crush the potential ‘laughing loudly’ reactions stone dead. Most of these 89 minutes contain extended jabs taken at Simon Cowell, Slurpee brain freeze jokes, food fights, aliens with dreadful Beatles impersonations for voices, and moments where the faceless goons will shout things like “James! Cameron is down!” and you’re supposed to laugh because they referenced James Cameron. They do that last joke at least six separate times during the film, by the by, and it gets more embarrassingly cringe-worthy each time.

Look, you could make a good movie out of Escape From Planet Earth. Hell, I get the feeling that the makers of this film were spurred into action by having watched the nearly-equally dismal Planet 51, which has a rather similar general premise,and collectively going, “We could do better than that!” Turns out they couldn’t. Escape From Planet Earth is a collective hodgepodge of everything that is wrong with kids’ animation today in as dull a package as one can make. I’d get angry, if you’re a regular follower of me you’ll know that I am quite passionate about animation and the quality of animated products, but I can’t muster up the energy to do so. It’s just so safe and committee-designed, like every design or casting or creative decision had to go through fourteen different executives to ensure its maximum level of profitability. There’s no life here, no effort, no love and if nobody involved could be bothered to be passionate about their work, then why I should I get passionate in tearing it to shreds? It’s a bad film, but I really don’t care because it’s too dull to make a big fuss about.

For what it’s worth, none of the kids in my screening seemed to enjoy it. They weren’t even restless, they were just bored. There were no laughs, no gasps of amazement or any of the reactions that accompanied my screenings of The Lego Movie or Frozen or Mr. Peabody & Sherman. Just the sounds of silence. And, despite every word I have written over the past 11 paragraphs, that may be the most damning criticism of all.